It's based on the gorgeous Dave Carter and Tracy Grammar song The Disappearing Man. The story itself requires no familiarity with the song or anything else. Rated R for brief but somewhat explicit sex.

I loved her prompt, which I saw and coveted before assignments went in. In particular, I liked her suggestion that it was a myth about the change of seasons.

Obviously this is not my usual writing style! The song is in second person, and I started the story that way as an experiment, but liked the way it read so I kept it. I wanted a style that wasn't similar to that of the song, but also wasn't ordinary prose, to preserve a somewhat surreal, dreamlike, heightened flavor.

The song has almost no clues in terms of setting. Going by the lyrics alone, the overall feel seems European-mythic, though "canyon" suggests America to me. But I'm a huge fan of Carter and Grammer, and their work overall is very, very American. So I decided to have a mythic story enacted in a real location, small-town USA with burgers and fries and bears in the woods outside of town. Since I prefer, whenever using real locations, to use ones I know, it's set in rural California near Yosemite - maybe Coarsegold, maybe Mariposa, maybe one of the other little towns nearby. The plants I mention all really grow there, and there really are bears and cougars (and meth labs) in the woods.

This post (http://heron61.livejournal.com/654149.html) commented that the story is very feminist, and received this comment, which cracked me up: "What I notice about that fanfiction story is that the author is extremely unusually familiar with Southern California native wildflowers."

I'm not particularly, but am familiar enough (my parents have a house in Mariposa) that I was able to fill in the rest with research.